The Republican policy position on sequestration is, on the surface, seemingly irrational.

There is near universal agreement that the deep cuts from the sequester that are due to take place in a few days will be damaging to the economy, costing in the neighborhood of a million jobs (based on...

This is not another impassioned plea for immediate action to enact gun control legislation. Well, at least not entirely.


With each gun massacre this year (Aurora, Colo.; Portland, Ore.; Newtown, Conn., just to name the last three well publicized ones), it would seem obvious that any discussion...

I lived virtually all of my life in the Northeast, mostly in the New York area, and the majority of my friends live there. Hurricane Sandy is more than just a political football to me. It's about as close to personally affecting me as something can be without me and...

Unemployment is still high, and President Obama's convention speech was solid but not spectacular, and yet he has a small but significant lead in the polls. Obama received an approval bump after the convention, and a bounce bigger than Mitt Romney's after the Republican convention, which...

Republicans have spent the last few days furiously trying to distance themselves from Missouri Rep. Todd Akin's assertion that women who are victims of "legitimate rape" do not get pregnant. They've tried to get him to drop out of his U.S. Senate race, even as polls...

Mitt Romney says a lot of things on the campaign trail, many of which turn out to have no relationship with the truth. But in selecting Rep. Paul Ryan to be his running mate, Romney made a statement as clear, unequivocal and truthful as he's made since announcing...

Imagine if former Yankee shortstop Fred Stanley said Derek Jeter was a bad hitter, and he, not Jeter, was the greatest slugging shortstop in team history. You would smile at the silliness of the statement. Stanley is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but the overwhelming...

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act Thursday, and I, of course, am very happy about that. It means that tens of millions of Americans without insurance -- from kids in their 20s who can stay on their parents'...

When the Republican-controlled Michigan House of Representatives banned a Democratic representative from speaking because she used the word "vagina" in debating an anti-abortion bill (which has been called the "most extreme" in the nation), the story went national. Progressive sites like The Huffington Post...

Mitt Romney had a chance Monday to demonstrate to the American people that he was more than an opportunistic mercenary who would say anything to win the White House. And he failed. Miserably.

Put another way, he blew his chance at a "No, ma'am" moment.

On October 10, 2008, less...

Dear Sen. Feingold:

As you know, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board Friday officially certified a recall election for far-right Governor Scott Walker. This was not a close call, as the board found 900,939 valid signatures, far more than the 540,208 minimum needed to force an election.

I...

It's starting to look like the Obama administration is moving toward a decision to get American troops out of Afghanistan at an even faster pace than the drawdowns announced in November. I hope so. At this point, we no longer have any valid interest in maintaining tens of thousands...

Bill Maher, in relaying his last "New Rule" on the Jan. 27 episode of "Real Time," returned to an argument about the GOP presidential race that he has advanced regularly:

"You know, Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X. And he's an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who...

While you sometimes have to convince skeptics that politics matter, it's even harder to get people to see that the decisions the media make when it comes to pop culture are important. But they are. We live in a time in which celebrity is not only something that often comes...

The minute the clock strikes midnight Monday night, signifying that November 14 has turned into November 15, the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin will begin.

The organizers of the Walker recall have some wind at their backs. They were able to recall two GOP state...

"I don't care about that."

That is what Rick Perry said in the New York Times when John Harwood told him his tax plan would increase income inequality. Give Perry credit for his honesty. After all, he just articulated out loud what is the accepted dogma of...

When I read that Jerry Brown was "bewildered and stunned" at how ideological and uncompromising the GOP had become in California, I was surprised and dismayed, all at the same time.

I was surprised because I had to wonder if the governor had been paying attention to national politics....

Imagine this scenario: You're pro-choice and you attend a debate between two candidates for office on the issue of a constitutional amendment to criminalize abortion. The first candidate argues that abortion is murder, and if a doctor performs an abortion on a woman, both of them should be charged with...

If one message has emerged from the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, I think it's this: The Republican Party, at least in the House of Representatives, has been captured by far-right ideologues who are either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the practical effect of their insistence on ideological purity....

David Brooks's New York Times column on Monday created quite a stir, getting major play on cable television news and online (at least between Casey Anthony reports).

Most of the discussion turned on Brooks' assertion that

...the Republican Party may no longer be...